Chain Free hospitals, Chain Free Community and Chain Free Environment
Unrecognized Mistreatment
The Impact of social strives and a clan conflict that was experienced have ruined and aggravated not only the physical and visible aspect of social fabric in Somaliland community, but it also damaged seriously the psychological well being of the local community. The undiscovered wounds those emerged in the minds of the people with trauma, nightmares, flashbacks and bad memories and predisposed thousands of people to mental disorders who were then chained up for years without basic needs, treatment and isolating from community mainstream. Due to the cultural believes life inheritance and chaining are one of the worst cultural mistreat to the mentally ill people in Somali society.
Use of chains is very common and widely used in the community against the
| Restraints can take different shapes. The most common, and one of the harshest, which is still common in Somaliland Community is to chain the person to a post or a bed, or to chain both legs |
mentally ill persons. The community use chains as a form of restraining the patients from violence and wandering around aimlessly which could deteriorate his/her situation dramat
ically. The community is not well-aware or conscious enough about their conduct of violation of rights and mistreatments against the mentally ill people which they commit.
The whole environment becomes an unsafe place to live for a person with mental illness. The rights of people with mental illness continue to be denied by many sectors in the society.
In a baseline survey report conducted by GAVO in 2004 it shows that the most common mistreatments of the community against the mentally ill people have the following weighs
Mistreatment of mentally ill patients
74% of the mentally ill people are mistreated with chains
7% beaten
7% insulted of laughed at
5% locked in rooms against their will
4% not considered for a job after recovering
3% called after bad names
Read more about GAVO Baseline Report…….. |
GAVO has been stressing the dignity and rights of persons with mental illness as reflected in its strategy of mental health program which aims at reducing the use of chains. Community mental health initiative activities has been engaging chain free activities which is encouraging the mental hospitals staff and the relatives of the patients to dis-chain the patients and minimise its use
However, GAVO commits to continue advocating for the elimination of all the negatively effecting norms used against the mentally ill people in the community, and as part of that it has already started to dischain some of the patients in the two mental hospitals of Berbera and Hargeisa
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